Environmental activists in Appalachia have long suspected that water samples from mountaintop removal mines are sometimes tampered with, but now someone has been caught at it. IMO, this kind of thing is a natural consequence of letting the extractive industry buy politicians…or lab techs or anybody else.

I hope this case strengthens the campaign in Tennessee and other states to keep regulatory authority for coal mining (primacy) with the federal Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, and not the states.

“A Raleigh County man pleaded guilty Thursday to repeatedly faking compliant water quality standards for coal companies, in a case that raises questions about the self-reporting system state and federal regulators use as a central tool to judge if the mining industry is following pollution limits.”

In a breathtaking but largely overlooked ruling this week, a federal judge agreed that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers may disregard studies on the health impacts of mountaintop removal mining in its permitting process, only two weeks after Goldman Prize Award-winning activist Maria Gunnoe wrote an impassioned plea to President Obama to renew withdrawn funding for US Geological Survey research on strip mining operations and redouble federal action to address the decades-old humanitarian disaster.

Leza Greenwald, of Athens, Mercer County, gets her head shaved on the State Capitol steps Monday with several other woman and men protesting mountaintop removal coal mining. The group sheared their locks “to represent the stripping of our heritage, our homes, our water and our land,” according to the group’s social media campaign.

Jeremy Nichols with Denver-based WildEarth Guardians said burning the fuel would release more than 220 million metric tons of the climate-changing greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.The environmental group planned to appeal the BLM’s approval of the Bull Mountain lease sale, Nichols said.

Similar actions have been taken by the group against 12 areas proposed for leasing in the Powder River Basin, an area of southeast Montana and northeast Wyoming that produces more coal than any other region in the United States.

“BLM seems to believe its job is to appease the coal industry, not advance a new energy economy,” Nichols said in an email. “Rather than do its part to confront global warming and find ways to transition away from dirty energy, BLM continues to rubber-stamp massive coal leasing proposals like this.”